The Vanishing Violin (2 page)

“And every night, someone is loading paper into every single tray of every copy machine, getting it ready for the next day. They’re stacking the reams of paper neatly in the supply closet, instead of merely leaving them scattered around the room, as is the usual practice. The other day, Sister Eugenia jammed the machine in the faculty room so badly that we had to call a repairman, but when he showed up the next morning, somehow it had been fixed.

“Last night was my turn. As Miss St. Pierre so astutely pointed out, all the furniture in my office was rearranged. Nothing missing, not a paper on my desk is out of place. And do you know what I find the most vexing? This arrangement is much better. Now, I do believe in miracles, but I also believe that the good Lord has more important things on his mind than cleaning nasty refrigerators and redecorating offices. I want an explanation, and you girls are going to find it for me. You may snoop around to your hearts’ content. So, do we have a deal?”

Margaret stood up and shook hands with Sister Bernadette. “You came to the right place, Sister.”

“Satisfaction guaranteed,” I added.

“I’ll be counting on that, Miss St. Pierre.”

Gulp.

Which explains, more or less, why we are spending a Friday afternoon in the subterranean rat kingdom that is St. Veronica’s basement. Murder and intrigue. Espionage. Missing persons. Heck, even a lost dog. But tracking down some misguided do-gooder who is sneaking into the school at night to clean and straighten? Oy.

“I guess this is what we meant by ‘No Case Too Small,’ eh, Margaret?” I grumble, spitting out a mouthful of cobweb.

“Not all detective work is glamorous,” she replies. “The real world isn’t like TV.”

“Yeah, on TV you miss out on the funky smells of places like this,” Rebecca says. “Hey, how come nobody ever came up with smell-evision?”

Margaret forges on and then stops abruptly in front of a refrigerator-size pile of old textbooks. Rebecca and I clunk into each other and then into Leigh Ann, who wobbles like a bowling pin before regaining her balance.

“Why are these down here?” Margaret asks. “Do you know how many trees it took to make these books? I’m going to talk to Sister Bernadette about recycling these.”

(Please add “environmental activist” to Margaret’s
résumé, right after “straight-A student” and “violin prodigy.”)

Meanwhile, my flashlight reveals something chromey bright on the other side of the books, and I move closer to investigate. “Hey, a doorknob.”

Margaret, Leigh Ann, and Rebecca crowd around me as I shine my light around the edge of the door.

“Where do you think it leads?” Leigh Ann asks.

“It’s just a storage room,” Margaret says. “Probably full of more textbooks like these. In fact, that probably explains why these are stacked right here. They’re going to go in there. Try the door.”

I reach for the knob, and just as I am about to put my hand on it, Rebecca gasps really loudly right in my ear. I almost have a heart attack, and she laughs hysterically.

“Oh, you are just a regular riot, Miss Chen,” I say, and stick out my tongue. I try the knob, but it doesn’t budge. When I put my shoulder against the door and shove, nothing happens.

“They don’t make ’em like this anymore,” Rebecca says, pushing against it with me.

Margaret shakes her head sadly. “Well, your first problem, geniuses, is that the door opens out.”

Becca and I look sheepishly at each other.

“What do you think about that lock, Becca?” Margaret asks, still smirking at us. “Think you can pick it?”

Becca, whose lock-picking skills came in handy in our previous case, takes my flashlight and kneels down
for a closer look. “There are two locks. I could probably open the one connected to the knob with my school ID. But this one up here is a dead bolt. I’ll need a few tools.”

“Can’t we just ask Sister Bernadette for the key?” Leigh Ann asks.

Za-zoink
. A perfectly reasonable question, no?

Margaret slaps her palm to her forehead and says, “Jeez, I keep forgetting that we have permission to be doing this. Okay, let’s take a quick look over there and then get out of here. Soph, lead the way.” She points to the darkest, creepiest corner in the basement.

“I am oh-so-happy to get my recommended daily allowance of spiderweb gunk.” I step forward, swatting madly at the scurrying spiders, and completely miss what is on the floor right in front of me—a gooey puddle oozing out from beneath a set of metal shelves. As my stomach does a double backflip with a twist, I point my flashlight at my brand-new Chuck Taylor. I pry it loose—icky-ick-icky-ick. The ooze I’m standing in is red—blood-red.

But whose shoes left those too-few clues?

“Ohmigoshohmigoshohmigosh.”

“What’s wrong?” Margaret grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me.

“I—I just stepped in …”

“Blood,” says Rebecca.

A mere step behind us, Leigh Ann swallows loudly enough for me to hear her. “Bl-blood?” Her voice is barely a whisper.

“Nobody move!” Margaret orders.

I drop my lightsaber, something I have an unfortunate history of doing in stressful situations. Rebecca gasps, and poor Leigh Ann’s death grip on my arm is cutting off my circulation as she starts to say a Hail Mary.

“Wh-what is it?” I manage to stammer.

Margaret shines her light on our faces and giggles. That’s right—Miss Wrobel is giggling. Margaret will smile frequently, chuckle occasionally. But until this moment, she has never giggled.

“It’s paint! Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you more. I just didn’t want anyone to disturb the evidence.”

“We oughta—” I start.

“Kill you,” Leigh Ann says.

“Twice,” adds Rebecca.

“Is that so?” Margaret says, stifling another giggling fit and crouching down to find the source of the puddle. “Look, here’s the paint can.” She points to it, lying on its side behind the bottom shelf.

“Now, since it is still wet, we have to assume that it must have been very recently knocked over. Maybe the someone we’re looking for was just here and heard us. Let’s survey the crime scene before it’s completely compromised.”

For someone who supposedly doesn’t watch a lot of television, Margaret sure knows all that
CSI
lingo.

“Crime scene? Compromised?” Rebecca sputters. “You just took a month off my life. Someday I’m gonna need that time.”

Margaret is already busy “surveying.” “See these footprints in the dust? Definitely new.” She lifts the overturned paint can and gives it a good shake. The lid is on, but there is a dent in the top, where paint continues to ooze. “Still quite a bit left. It would be empty if it had been knocked over more than a day ago. Ah, I bet that’s what they were after.” She stretches her neck to get a look at the top shelf. “Cleaning supplies. Whoever it was doing the reaching had to stand on the bottom shelf to reach up to the top. When they did that, their feet must
have pushed this can right off the back of the shelf. It landed on that pile of rags, so they never heard it fall.”

“Which could explain why a person who’s obviously a neat freak didn’t pick it up,” I say. “Assuming this was our guy—or girl.”

“Right.” Margaret claps her hands together, shaking off the dust, and turns to Leigh Ann, the “new kid” at St. Veronica’s we got to know during our first case. “Okay, based on what we have observed, what do we know about our suspect?”

“Um, he’s clumsy?”

“And?”

“He’s short. Or she’s short. For a grown-up, anyway. I mean, I’m only five foot six and I can almost reach the top shelf.”

Margaret nods. “Excellent. And?”

Leigh Ann’s face scrunches up. She starts to reach for my flashlight but, after noting its lovely spider-webby coating, turns to me. “Um, Sophie, would you shine that over there, on the floor?” she says, pointing to a spot next to the shelves. She bends over to take a closer look.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Footprints. Kind of small—not much bigger than mine—but they’re smooth. Definitely not sneakers.”

“One more question,” says Margaret. “Right- or left-handed?”

“How is she supposed to tell that from the footprints?” Rebecca asks.

“Which hand did he use to grab the cleaning supplies?”

I raise my hand, excited because I think I know the answer. “Call on me! Call on me!”

Rebecca clunks me on the head with her flashlight. “Suck-up.”

“Go ahead, Sophie, tell them,” Margaret says primly.

I point to the shelves where our suspect has stepped with his or her right foot, and then to a shelf at eye level where a right hand has made a clear imprint in the dust. “Based on the angle of the fingers, he was holding on to this shelf with his right hand … which means that he grabbed the bottle of cleaning stuff with his left.”

Applause from Leigh Ann and Margaret and a hearty Bronx cheer from Becca.

“There’s one big problem with all this,” she scoffs. “How do you know it wasn’t just the janitor coming down here to get cleaning supplies? Isn’t that what he does? He’s probably down here getting stuff off that shelf every day.”

Leigh Ann beams. “I’m starting to get this detective stuff. Think about the janitor for a second, Becca.”

“What about him?”

“How tall is he?”

“I dunno. Pretty tall. Definitely over six feet. So?”

“Soooo, he wouldn’t need to stand on this shelf to reach the top one.”

“Ohhhhhh,” we chorus.

“Now can we get the heck out of here?” pleads Leigh Ann. “It’s going to take a gallon of Cleen and Shinee to get these cobwebs out of my hair.”

As we backtrack through the basement, I give a secret wave at my whiskered friend and whisper, “We’ll be back.”

Brainiac. Prodigy. Rock band manager. Object of clandestine admiration. Margaret’s résumé continues its relentless expansion

There is a crowd at Perkatory, the coffee shop just around the corner from St. Veronica’s that is also our favorite after-school hangout, so we don’t get our usual cool-kids’ table. Instead, the four of us squeeze into a love seat covered with fabric that instantly makes me itchy and fidgety—fiditchety.

“Stop wriggling,” complains Rebecca, who is halfway on my lap.

“I can’t help it,” I say. “This couch is gross. Let me up—I’m gonna sit on the arm.”

Rebecca claims my abandoned real estate. “And as long as you’re up, why don’t you go order for us?” She smiles sweetly and flutters her eyelashes at me.

I bow deeply. “Your wish is my command, O Socially Challenged One.”

Leigh Ann stands up and takes me by the arm. “Come on, Soph, I’ll go with you.”

Leigh Ann and I got off to kind of a rocky start, thanks to my irrational, conclusion-jumping alter ego (who looks exactly like me). You see, there’s this boy, Raf, who’s been my friend, like, forever. But while we were busy chasing down the clues to find the ring, I started having these I-want-to-be-more-than-friends thoughts. Constantly. And then I just happened to see Leigh Ann’s cell phone with his number in it, and I basically totally freaked out. Trust me, if you could see the future supermodel that is Leigh Ann, you would understand why I lost it. But everything worked out—for me! (My knees still go a little weak when I think about how well it worked out.) She forgave me for my little journey to jerkdom, and in the weeks since the Unfortunate Misunderstanding, Leigh Ann and I have become great friends. In fact, it feels like she’s been part of our group for ages and ages.

“Expect a little something extra in your cup,” I say, pantomiming a spit at Rebecca.

The girl behind the counter is new; she has spiky black hair with a streak of orange, and she’s wearing a faded purple NYU sweatshirt. Leaning over the counter for a closer look at my blazer, she reads the crest.

“Ah, St. Veronica’s. And the green ones are Faircastle. And maroon is Our Lady of Victory. I had no idea there were so many girls’ schools around here. It’s crazy.”

While she goes to work on our order, I ask her how she likes NYU. One of my many dreams is to live in the Village, go to New York University, and play my guitar in all the cool clubs down there, so a girl in an NYU sweatshirt is a source of valuable information.